I want to take this opportunity to talk about the fashion in Korea. I know every country has their own fashion trends but I have to believe that Korea has some of the more unique ones. I will start with the t-shirts. Every t-shirt in Korea is written in grammatically incorrect English. It is so bad, I have a theory that they make the shirts wrong on purpose, because you would think that if they didn't do it on purpose they would eventually get at least one shirt right. This type of English is called Konglish, or Korean English. Another odd thing is that you almost never see a shirt that is written in Korean and if you do it is usually from an event and the Korean is the details about the event. The last thing I will say about the t-shirts is they are stuck in the 80's. I mean bright neon pink, green, yellow and orange, you know what I mean. All the women under the age of 30 in Korea wear extremely short skirts 80% of the time. They also always wear high heels, the 3 inch kind, all the time. Even when they are at the beach in a bikini they wear high heals. Speaking of the beach, the Korean bikini is usually 4 pieces, the top, which is always padded, the bottom which is usually a boy short or modest cut, you wont see any thongs here. Then there is a waste wrap and some sort of top cover. I think that many of them wear less clothes on the bottom half of their body everyday then they do at the beach. This is not to say that western bikini's are not worn because they are, but most of the bikini's are the style I described. Now don't get the wrong idea, these are the most beautiful women I have ever seen and there are a lot of them but they just seem to have a problem with the beach. They also hate the sun, women walk down the street with umbrella's when their is no rain to keep the sun off of them. This is probably why many of them have such fair and healthy skin, but I still find it strange. I have also noticed an obscene amount of converse shoes. So many people where converse, I would say more people wear converse in Korea than did back in the 80's in the U.S. Next I will discuss the Flower Boy. This is the term for young Korean men, who take more time and look almost identical to the young women of their age. Many young men fall into this category. They wear man bags (purses), have long hair, wear pink, etc. The only way to tell the difference from 100 meters is by the pants, they don't wear skirts. Another interesting trend here in Korea is the couple shirt. After three months of dating someone in Korea it is customary to buy and wear matching rings. At this point and sometimes before it is also customary to buy and wear matching t-shirts. They are usually the exact same shirt, same color, everything. Sometimes they will vary the color slightly but it will still be the same design. Some crazy couples will even take it a step further and wear completely identical outfits, the same shoes, socks, pants (usually jeans of the exact same color and design), bags, watches, sunglasses, rings and even hats. I can only assume they wear matching underwear too. The last fashion trend I will mention is the socially acceptable trend of wearing the same outfit several days in a row. For some reason it is okay to wear the same clothes more than one day in a row without washing them. Don't get me wrong they don't wear dirty clothes, but as long as they stay clean they don't seem to mind wearing them again and no one else seems to think it is strange. I like this environmentally conscious trend, but I don't think they do it to save the earth. I think it has more to do with the fact that clothes are very expensive here and it costs to much to buy a lot of outfits, so they compensate by wearing the ones they do buy more often. This is just the tip of the iceberg of Korean fashion, I'm sure I will touch on this subject again in the future.
